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Checking off your bucket list may help you earn membership in the Travelers’ Century Club

Passport stamps

Photograph by: angelonz, Fotolia.com
, Canada.com

When travellers gets together, it doesn’t take long before they start comparing places they’ve been in order to determine who’s been to the most, or the most exotic, places.

The Travelers’ Century Club is the ultimate in bragging rights for travellers as you can only become a full-fledged member if you’ve visited 100 or more countries. (You can become a provisional member at 75 countries, but it doesn’t have the same ring to it as 100.)

The TCC began in 1954 when travel was a lot more difficult. Air travel was expensive, trains were more common and ships travelled scheduled routes and not the far-ranging cruise itineraries of today.

The club’s first meeting was the brainchild of a California travel agent and it drew 27 members. Today, the TCC membership has grown to more than 2,000, including a chapter in Canada which is led by Area Coordinator Rick Shaver in Toronto. The Canadian chapter launched two years ago with 40 members and has grown to 55 since then, with roughly half being from the West and the other half in the East.

The Canadian chapter meets several times a year and members get to update each other on their latest voyages and hear from guest speakers. “It’s all designed to be non-commercial, fun and inspire people to travel,” said Shaver during a recent interview.

You might think that a club like the TCC would have a lot of braggarts, but Shaver says it’s the opposite. He says that members are humble and he links it to their curiousness about the world and readiness to ask questions of other people about places they’ve been. “There’s almost a Canadianness to this group,” he said.

Shaver himself has been to 108 countries, only reaching 100 a few years ago. To reach that mark took a lot of time. He first became aware of the TCC’s existence in 1992 when he met a member during the course of his work. At that time, Shaver had been to 43 countries. It’s taken him nearly 20 years to surpass the century mark.

“You know what they say? It’s the hardest club in the world to get into,” he said.

The TCC’s list goes beyond just member states in the United Nations. It contains countries, remote islands, overseas territories and other obscure places. Shaver points out that the list has been designed “to include some of the most exotic and hard to reach destinations.”

Examples include the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, considered to be the most difficult spot to reach by most TCC members, nearer to home places like St. Pierre and Miquelon off of Newfoundland and even Alaska.

The TCC works on an honour system. No one is going to check your passport stamps to verify that you’ve been to each place. Some debate what constitutes an actual visit to a country. Does a plane refueling count? Do you have to spend the night there? Getting your feet on the ground, if only for a few minutes, seems to be the only criterion, but Shaver emphasizes that the club is all about inspiring people to travel. It’s not just meant to be about putting your foot across the border to claim another country on your bucket list, but about really learning about a place and experiencing it.

Shaver says that when you’ve visited a place and experienced it, you now have a personal connection to it. Later, when you read about it online or see it on a TV news report, it’s not just a dot on a map, but a real place with real people that you can relate to. That thought feeds into the club’s motto: “the passport to peace through understanding.”

The world is a more connected place now with more ships and airplanes so reaching the century mark is a lot more attainable than it was half a century ago, but there are still plenty of places in the world that even TCC members have never been, said Shaver.

Those tiny islands in the southern seas, Antarctica, remote regions of Africa, former Soviet republics and dangerous destinations are on the bucket lists of many a TCC member.

“People ask me, haven’t you already been everywhere?,” said Shaver. “No, it’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

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